A Conceptual Analysis of Empathy

Empathy is a polymorphous concept. It is used as a capacity word, a disposition word, and an activity word, but the category of capacity has a general logical priority. All the branches of the concept of empathy depend on whether or not we can feel (perceive) the feelings (emotions) of other people. It is this perceptual core of the various usages of the concept that I explore in what follows.

In the opening sections, I examine some of the ordinary descriptions of and objections to this concept. Next, I isolate and try to support those properties associated with the thesis that empathy is a feeling, a “-pathy.” Following that, I develop the further implications associated with the prefix “em-”, leading up to some admittedly speculative attempts to explain how a capacity analyzed in this way is possible. And, in conclusion, I suggest several human tasks that are facilitated by the capacity for empathic perception. For, in empathy, one comes truly to feel with another individual, and access to this individual and to his idiosyncratic temporal ordering is exactly what empathic “observation” can order and detached registration cannot.

Many students of behavior mention a kind of awareness that is not identifiable with sense perception. In anthropology and sociology and history, one finds advocates of the need to understand from the inside—for example, members of the Verstehen school. In order to understand what something means to a person or a culture, one is admonished to get inside the skin of the members of this alien culture. Since important areas of human activity are meaning-bound, and, moreover, since these meanings can never be gained by detached outsiders, one is urged to somehow get inside and feel these meanings for oneself. Consequently the social scientist will discover the key to the meaning if he can rightly and genuinely feel some elements from the alien culture. Once he has